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A Middle Way
Autonomy -- Hydrodynamics -- Brownian motion -- From Brownian motion to bending beams -- An engineering approach -- The right variables and natural kinds.
The Devil in the Details
Robert Batterman examines a form of scientific reasoning called asymptotic reasoning, arguing that it has important consequences for our understanding of the scientific process as a whole. He maintains that asymptotic reasoning is essential for explaining what physicists call universal behavior. With clarity and rigor, he simplifies complex questions about universal behavior, demonstrating a profound understanding of the underlying structures that ground them. This book introduces a valuable new method that is certain to fill explanatory gaps across disciplines.
Because Without Cause
Not all scientific explanations work by describing causal connections between events or the world's overall causal structure. In addition, mathematicians regard some proofs as explaining why the theorems being proved do in fact hold. This book proposes new philosophical accounts of many kinds of non-causal explanations in science and mathematics.
Causation and Its Basis in Fundamental Physics
This book is the first comprehensive attempt to solve what Hartry Field has called "the central problem in the metaphysics of causation": the problem of reconciling the need for causal notions in the special sciences with the limited role of causation in physics. If the world evolves fundamentally according to laws of physics, what place can be found for the causal regularities and principles identified by the special sciences? Douglas Kutach answers this question by invoking a novel distinction between fundamental and derivative reality and a complementary conception of reduction. He then constructs a framework that allows all causal regularities from the sciences to be rendered in terms of...
Effective Spacetime
This book discusses the notion that quantum gravity may represent the "breakdown" of spacetime at extremely high energy scales. If spacetime does not exist at the fundamental level, then it has to be considered "emergent", in other words an effective structure, valid at low energy scales. The author develops a conception of emergence appropriate to effective theories in physics, and shows how it applies (or could apply) in various approaches to quantum gravity, including condensed matter approaches, discrete approaches, and loop quantum gravity.
Investigations of Explanatory Strategies in Linguistics
Linguistic theories often suffer from the dilemma that their explanatory power is based on extra-linguistic assumptions. The book delineates the essence of linguistic theory and linguistic explanation and, in doing so, proposes a solution to the dilemma. Simultaneously, the book is one of the first attempts to profile the philosophy of linguistics as a distinct sub-discipline of the contemporary philosophy of science.
In the Wake of Chaos
Chaos theory has captured scientific and popular attention. What began as the discovery of randomness in simple physical systems has become a widespread fascination with "chaotic" models of everything from business cycles to brainwaves to heart attacks. But what exactly does this explosion of new research into chaotic phenomena mean for our understanding of the world? In this timely book, Stephen Kellert takes the first sustained look at the broad intellectual and philosophical questions raised by recent advances in chaos theory—its implications for science as a source of knowledge and for the very meaning of that knowledge itself.
Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge
The first comprehensive exploration of the nature and value of understanding, addressing burgeoning debates in epistemology and philosophy of science.
Why More Is Different
The physics of condensed matter, in contrast to quantum physics or cosmology, is not traditionally associated with deep philosophical questions. However, as science - largely thanks to more powerful computers - becomes capable of analysing and modelling ever more complex many-body systems, basic questions of philosophical relevance arise. Questions about the emergence of structure, the nature of cooperative behaviour, the implications of the second law, the quantum-classical transition and many other issues. This book is a collection of essays by leading physicists and philosophers. Each investigates one or more of these issues, making use of examples from modern condensed matter research. Physicists and philosophers alike will find surprising and stimulating ideas in these pages.
